20 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN “Development can be a very risky endeavor, but he has managed to move up in scale from modest projects to his most current work.“ —CHRISTINE USSLER ’81 He recalled designing the family’s country home overlooking the Hudson River Valley. It was most important to his children that the home be “off the grid.” He designed a concrete and wood minimalist home using some of the same passive design standards incorporated into the new Alloy Block school buildings. The home uses solar panels for year-round energy and features a well-insulated envelope to cut down on heating and cooling needs. When it came to the Alloy Block, Della Valle and his colleagues wanted to design largescale buildings that will continue to be sustainable well into the future, eventually becoming carbon neutral, which means they will not contribute to the emission of greenhouse gasses. “We’ve pushed the bounds of sustainability, but we’ve never taken it to this place. … It’s always been in the background,” he says. Della Valle thought of the project as a partnership with the community. “We may not agree on what the future should look like, but the community offered constructive criticism and it had a positive influence on the outcome,” Della Valle says. “We made changes together and figured out how to make this the best that it can be. That process was successful. Although very enduring and difficult, we had a clear obligation to be reliable partners and to listen carefully.” During the planning, he used the existing buildings on the site to create public programs, such as a block-long mural competition. One space was donated for use as a local artist-in-residence program. “We really tried to show this was different,” he says. “This was not going to be just another project.” The first phase of the Alloy Block includes what he says is the city’s first all-electric tower. Functions typically powered by natural gas will be run off electricity instead, such as stove tops, dryers and hot water
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